Former EastEnders actress Sheila Hancock on her love of cars

From Morris to Mini via a pack of Jaguars, the star of Barking In Essex and
The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas remembers the vehicles that moved her

Sheila Hancock in a press photo from her time in sitcoms, which began in 1961 with BBC's The Rag Trade

By Christian House

7:00AM BST 09 Oct 2014

This was taken outside a house I was living in during the 1960s. The main interest is the car, a Morgan, because I’m besotted with cars and always have been. I was obsessed with them long before I met John [Thaw, her late husband]. This was a press photo at the time when I was doing lots of sitcoms – probably for The Bed-Sit Girl or Mr Digby Darling; I did a succession starting with The Rag Trade in 1961. It was at the height of when I was doing sitcoms that I had the Morgan. I was at my flashiest.

My first car was a Morris 1000. Then I had an MG, and then came the bliss of having a Morgan. There used to be a car show at Earls Court that I always went to, and I saw this Morgan and absolutely fell in love with it. I said, ‘Oh, I want one of those,’ and Peter Morgan, the chairman, said, ‘There’s a waiting list of a year’ or something. I went up to the factory and begged them, and they let me have it. I probably jumped the queue, to tell the truth.

It was a little four-seater. It had two terrible seats at the back and was rather unsophisticated. You had to take the top off manually and stick it on with press studs and things. I got rid of that car after one occasion when I was driving to the country with my children in the back and it was raining and they were absolutely drenched. I wrapped them in towels.

For a terrible period I had a really boring Peugeot. It drove me insane. And after that, thank God, John bought me a Jaguar sports car. I had a new one every year; I was on a contract with Jaguar. Then, last year, it felt a bit ostentatious with the recession and all that; although I was getting it cheaper, still the running costs were huge. I thought, ‘I can’t go on with this,’ so I went and got a Mini, but a specially built one. It’s divine, it’s absolutely wonderful, but a huge contrast to the Jag.

I’ve always loved beautiful machines. I had a Lambretta scooter in the 1960s. In my novel there’s a sequence where the protagonist goes on a motorbike ride with a guy, and that is a memory of mine as a child. My sister, who's older than me, was in Ensa [the Entertainments National Service Association] during the war, and she had met some soldier while they were touring in Africa. And this guy turned up at our house in Bexleyheath on a motorbike.

My sister was wearing a tight skirt and a hat and she said, ‘Bugger off, I’m not going on that.’ I was about 10 then, I suppose, and I said, ‘Oh, I’ll go!’ And that was my first experience of speed and excitement. I just loved it.

Sheila Hancock’s first novel, Miss Carter’s War, is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99); she will be discussing the book with Kate Mosse at the Bloomsbury Institute on 23rd October. www.bloomsburyinstitute.com